Quote

Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alasdair MacIntyre
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 12
Philosopher
Professor
Glasgow
Scotland
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre
Psychology
Substituted
Ethics
Indefinite
Function
Theorists
Emotion
Utterance
Moral
Article
Action
Articles
Would
Definite
Evince
Correct
Emotive

More quotes by Alasdair MacIntyre

Image
A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’
Alasdair MacIntyre
Image
Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.
Alasdair MacIntyre